The writer says years of internet monetization and the recent spread of large language model-generated material have made online spaces less enjoyable and harder to use for meaningful learning and connection. They describe a childhood and career shaped by message boards, blogs, social networks, chatrooms, and online communities, where they made friends, found jobs, and encountered ideas that influenced their beliefs. They compare the growth of AI-generated content to the “pale” in Disco Elysium, a destructive nothingness that degrades information and gradually expands between the game’s regions. The writer says valuable communities and thoughtful sources still exist, including some people found on Bluesky, but are increasingly difficult to locate amid low-quality material. They criticize short-form posts and videos across platforms including Instagram, TikTok, X, Mastodon, and Bluesky as poor vehicles for serious engagement with knowledge, arguing that such formats encourage tribalism, groupthink, and intellectual laziness. The writer has stopped reading Hacker News because they believe too many front-page submissions are obviously LLM-written and may contain filler rather than worthwhile ideas. They support agentic software engineering but object to coworkers passing LLM-generated writing off as their own, saying it makes it harder to understand colleagues’ beliefs and reasoning and weakens collaboration.